THE GREAT GOSPEL OF JOHN
VOLUME 5
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi. (cont.) Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16
- Chapter 123 -
Wisdom as the effect of practiced love.
1
(The Lord:) "The more activity there is in the soul, the lighter it becomes within it; for fire is the primary element of the life of the soul. The mightier this element sets to work, the more light it spreads in and out of itself. Therefore, the more fire there is in the life of the soul, the more life-light it develops. With this inner life-light the soul then begins more and more to penetrate and understand the innermost secrets of life.
2
This deeper insight and understanding lend new courage to the soul so that it will love and adore God even more, and this love is already the first spark of the Divine Spirit within the soul. It grows and increases mightily, and soon the soul unites completely with the Spirit of God and is then led through the Spirit of God into all truth and wisdom.
3
Let us presume a man had attained to all this wisdom in the way I have been preaching and demonstrating to you continually for days. Tell Me, was this because that man had received all the words I had spoken to you exactly and unchanged to the jot? Oh no! He had learned of nothing else but the two commandments of love; only the exact, painstaking, actual compliance with the same gave him everything else.
4
There are some amongst you who, although I have demonstrated the matter very clearly, are asking in their mind: `Well, how can the soul attain to such wisdom by complying with the two commandments?' And I tell you: Because the soul has been so organized from the beginning!
5
How does a grape ripen and become full of sweetness and spirit - seeing that it is only a simple, natural plant? This is accomplished by the light and the warmth of the sun. Through the light and through the warmth the nature spirits in the vine become increasingly more active. As they become more and more active and there is more friction between them, they become increasingly more fiery and shining in themselves. And this constant increase in their brightness and luminescence brings about an obvious increase in their mutual specific intelligence; the brighter their intelligence becomes, the more they recognize each other as belonging to one and the same order and, seizing each other, begin to organize themselves and unite. Once this has been fully accomplished, the grape has become ripe and edible.
6
Once the juice has been gathered and well stored in a recipient, its well-ordered natural spirits now will no longer tolerate any foreign element which contains in itself natural spirits of a very different order, which would disturb the accepted good order of the settled natural spirits of the grape juice. As soon as something foreign which belongs to another order enters the young wine, it brews and ferments until the foreign body has been thrown out or has fully been assimilated into its order. Once that has happened, only then the inner light and the inner warmth of the spirit awakes from the good order of all the natural spirits of the grape juice which has become pure, and through the previously yet very impure young wine a spiritually stronger and purer wine has matured.
7
So all this is an effect of the sun, that is, its light and its warmth. And likewise it is the same with a person and his soul! If he can put his soul into an ever greater activity through the observance of a law of the highest divine order, it will become brighter and warmer in all the areas of his life. It will then recognize itself ever brighter and more purely and likewise the divine power that flows into it ever more and more and also pulls it into an ever higher life.
8
But if it recognizes this power, it also recognizes God, from whom this power comes. But if it must necessarily recognize this, it must also love God ever more and more. With this love it then expels everything that is foreign out of its ever purer and more perfect order of life and becomes ever more one with the order of the Divine spirit in it; as this is certainly so, it is a foregone conclusion that a soul thus permeated by the Divine Spirit must gain in strength and power and infallibly become a true child of the Most High.
9
When such a soul then finally leaves the body and reaches the great Beyond endowed with the most perfected consciousness, it will certainly also immediately recognize God, since it has already become fully one with Him here and brought Him to the fullest and clearest consciousness in itself, and this is for the tangible reason that the eternally certainly very clearest consciousness of the spirit of God has become in a certain way the brightest and most united consciousness of the soul."